Pinoy bookstore joins Google Book Search

MANILA, Philippines – Rex Bookstore (RBS), one of the Philippines leaders in the industry, has joined the Google Book Search Publisher Partner Program. The move will see thousands of titles published by RBS digitized and indexed on Google’s search engine in the months to come. Starting this month, RBS journals and books in English and Filipino will be searchable through Google Book Search, which searches the full text of books stored in its database. Clicking a result from this search tool opens an interface in which the user may preview sample pages from the book as well as links to the publisher’s website and other online booksellers. RBS has over 5,000 titles, including textbooks for preschool to post-collegiate level, as well as reference and other leisure publications. Through Google Book Search, RBS can reach 24 million Filipino Internet users every day, along with hundreds of millions of Google daily users worldwide. "Participating in Google Book Search puts our authors at par with renowned international scholars housed by premium publishing houses all over the world," Don Timothy Buhain, chief operating officer of Rex Group of Companies, said in a statement released on Monday. RBS has been in the forefront of promoting the Filipino works worldwide through co-publishing programs that allow its books to be translated into foreign languages or imported by foreign publishers. By participating in Google Book Search, RBS has joined more than 20,000 publishers worldwide, including the world’s McGraw-Hill, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Wiley. "It’s an honor for Google to work with one of the most reputable publishing houses in the Philippines and a leader in local educational publishing," Erik Hartmann, head of Google Book Search Strategic Partnership Development for Southeast Asia, said. "The ability to discover locally published titles, in both English and Filipino languages, when searching on Google is really important for our millions of users in the Philippines," Hartmann added. - GMANews.TV